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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Reading Books on the iPad: iBooks Versus Kindle

I've written a lot about reading newspapers and magazines on the iPad. But one question I hear a lot is, how well does the iPad stack up against the Kindle for reading books?

I was skeptical at first, but after doing some book-reading on the device, I have to say that it's working quite well for me. As for the best reading application on the device? For now, it isn't much of a contest--though the app I prefer may not be the one you're thinking.

The biggest question I had at first about reading books on the iPad was whether it would be comfortable to read on the iPad's screen, which, like virtually all notebook computers, is based on a TFT liquid crystal display. The Kindle and other e-readers, including the Sony Reader series and the Nook, use E Ink displays that are "bi-stable." This means that the screen doesn't need to be refreshed and uses reflected light from the environment, instead of being lighted from the display itself. Some people think that such screens are less tiring on the eyes, although I haven't seen any definitive studies on this (and I've looked).

E Ink displays are better than LCDs in three main ways. First, they allow much better battery life, because they use power only when they're changing content. I get weeks of power on my Kindle when the Wi-Fi is off. Also, they are readable in bright sunlight, where the iPad screen can get washed out. And finally, they don't have as much glare. All that said, LCD displays have advantages as well: They work in darkened spaces, and they allow for color and video, which the E Ink displays currently do not.

For the times I'm using an e-reader, nearly always indoors or on trains or planes, the iPad screen worked quite well. The contrast is better than on the Kindle (as expected), and I didn't find reading a book on the iPad to be particularly tiring on my eyes. Now, most of my reading has been confined to an hour or so. Things might be different if I was reading the screen for multiple hours at a stretch. (Reading any screen for a long time does cause eye strain, so you should take the occasional break, make sure room lighting is appropriate if possible, and so on.)

So the next decision is which application to use to read books on the iPad. Today, there are really two choices: Apple;s iBooks app and Amazon's Kindle app. (There are a number of other choices for the iPod.) Read on to find out how I fared with each.

iBooks

iBooks is Apple's own application, and Apple has done a nice job with the aesthetics of the application. The company has tried to make iBooks look like real books in the physical world; they appear on an image of a bookshelf, and each book shows the title and page number you are on, as well as a screen image that looks like it has multiple pages behind it. You swipe left and right to change pages, each time seeing a simple animation of paper flipping. (I thought this was neat at first, then was annoyed after a while, then finally started ignoring it.)

Pressing on the title of the book on the top of the screen brings up several options. You can choose among fonts and font sizes, adjust the screen's brightness, and bring up a search tool. You can also go to the table of contents and see a list of bookmarks you've made in the text.

iBooks also lets you see two pages side-by-side in horizontal mode, like a traditional book. It's neat. But in practice, I found myself doing all my book reading in the vertical one-page mode.

Pressing down on the on-screen text lets you select a word or a phrase; you can then call up a dictionary, search for a word in the rest of the document, or "bookmark" a note. I often found iBooks was smarter at selecting the text I wanted than the Kindle application was, but I occasionally had trouble selecting words on the right-hand side of the page--it would turn the screen instead.

The books I tried generally looked quite good. Importing a book in ePub format worked well, although you need to do it in iTunes on a Mac or Windows machine. I've looked at books with all sorts of graphics: pictures, tables, and charts.

The downside is the iBooks store, which has a notably smaller selection (for now) than the Amazon store, and doesn't yet have nearly the wealth of reviews or recommendations that Amazon has. But the the store is very new, so that may change soon.

In short, iBooks looks great and worked well for me. I particularly liked navigating with books and the inclusion of a search feature and a dictionary. (Here is PCMag's full review of Apple's iBooks.)

Kindle

Amazon's Kindle application shares a lot with iBooks. It allows for color and for much better-looking images than on the Kindle devices, but it has a number of both advantages and disadvantates.

The Kindle app's home-screen background shows your books by cover or in a list format. The default page view is about as spare as you can imagine, showing just the title of the book at the top and white text on a black background. Swiping your finger left and right moves directly from one page to another, without a page-flipping animation. (A settings menu on the home page lets you add more complicated page-turning animations, but I found them very distracting.)

Pressing on the text lets you either highlight a selection or make a note using the onscreen keyboard. Generally, this works well, but as with iBooks, there were times when I found it hard to select precisely the section I want. And unlike on the Kindle devices, these highlights don't seem to be able to span page breaks.

Pressing down at the top or bottom of the screen brings up some controls, such as a way of setting a bookmark to return to, choosing from among five point sizes (but not fonts), controlling the brightness, and choosing to view your text as black on white, white on black, or black on sepia. I thought the standard black on white was easiest to read. (It looks gray in the picture above, but that's a function of the screen shot, not of the actual software.)

These options also show you where you are in the book, but as on the Kindle, it's listed as location numbers and percentage of the book read. I preferred the way iBooks uses page numbers. But I did like that the Kindle application lets you pull up a list of your notes and marks without going back to the table of contents.

One of the big advantages of the Kindle application is that Amazon has versions available for many platforms today, including the Kindle devices, Windows, Mac, Mac, iPhone, and BlackBerry. The system synchronizes where you are in the book and the notes you have made across devices, up to five devices registered per account. This conveniently lets you read your books on your smartphone even when the tablet isn't available.

On the other hand, the Kindle application is missing some things that iBooks has, including a dictionary (which is part of the Kindle device) and a feature that lets you search inside the book.

For now, it really comes down to the stores, and Amazon just has a much better selection. Some books aren't carried by either store, such as Michael Lewis's "The Big Short." But of the books I was looking for, a number were on Amazon and not on iBooks (Gregory Zuckerman's "Greatest Trade Ever Made," for example), and others were less expensive on Amazon (such as "Lords of Finance" and "The Ascent of Money").

Amazon has many more reviews and recommendations too. But I found downloading books to my iPad via the Amazon app to be slightly more complicated. By default, my account delievered the books to my Kindle device; I had to go in the Archived Items section of the Kindle application to download it to the iPad.

In short, I found iBooks has two important features that the Kindle app doesn't have: search and support for the more open ePub format. But Kindle has a notably better selection of books available, and the ability to sync with multiple devices. For me, that makes it the clear choice.

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